Skiing star is on a slippery slope

Bode Miller, the U.S. team's top alpine medal hope, mixes a brash attitude with top-notch results.

February 03, 2002|By Bonnie DeSimone, Tribune staff reporter.

Bode Miller was raised on terrain that posed a constant challenge.

His parents, Jo and Woody Miller, tromped through the woods in rural Easton, N.H., until they found a spot that spoke to them. They carried up lumber and built a home by the banks of a tumbling stream. The land was studded with rocks and sliced by ravines. Inside the house, almost as soon as Bode and his three siblings could toddle, they were scrambling up a steep stairway to a loft.

The athletic, idealistic Millers believed in doing without certain extras, such as running water and electricity, and they believed in letting their children develop their own sense of balance. It should be no surprise that Bode Miller chose as his vocation world-class skiing, where he literally lives on edges, calculating angles in flight, finding the shortest and often diciest path between Point A and Point B.

Miller, 24, with four victories in World Cup events this season, has bloomed into the U.S. ski team's top alpine medal hope in the Olympics. Last fall the seed of that idea existed only in Miller's mind.

A specialist in the so-called technical events of giant slalom and slalom, in which skiers zigzag around closely spaced gates on the hill, Miller could not seem to lean without toppling over. His hellbent-for-leather approach always seemed to result in a hooked tip, a skid, a detour off the course or, worse, an injury. He finished only half the World Cup races he started last year.

The lone mention of Miller in the U.S. ski team's season preview noted that he was coming back from a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament that had magically healed without surgery. Although Miller had posted some promising results in the giant slalom, he was regarded as a problem child, resistant to coaching.

He pleaded guilty in his up-tempo, genial manner, peppering his comments with words that will have to be bleeped if he wins a medal and makes the talk-show rounds.

"I mean, I listen to what they say, but more or less, coaches can only say what they see," Miller said in Val d'Isere, France, the day before he won a World Cup giant slalom to end an 18-year drought for American men in the event. "Everyone skis a little differently, and no one knows what's going to make someone else fast.

"I'm not afraid of blowing out. A lot of guys are. If they blow out, it means that they failed in some way or another. You can try to win without going 100 percent, but as soon as that starts to come into your psyche--`Oh, I'm going to try to win going 80 percent'--that just ends up screwing you. No one has success that way."

When Miller won back-to-back World Cup events in France and Italy in December, he was far off international radar screens. The French daily sports newspaper L'Equipe dubbed him "the Apache of the Appalachians," an alliteration that grafted a western Native American tribe onto an eastern U.S. mountain range. (For the record, Easton is in the White Mountains.)

The same story likened Miller's flexibility as he rounded gates to "a piece of chewing gum stuck to skis." But while Miller may have a bit of Gumby in him, he has been anything but poky this season. His last two wins, in Adelboden, Switzerland, and Schladming, Austria, have come by robust margins of 1.92 seconds and .66 seconds, respectively. Almost as impressive was his third-place finish in the slalom at Kitzbuehel, Austria, last month, achieved despite snapping 6 inches off one of his poles when he jammed it between his skis on the first run.

Miller's relentless, attacking style makes analysts shake their heads. No less an observer than sidelined Austrian speed demon Hermann Maier, whose harmless crash in the downhill four years ago at the Olympics in Nagano, Japan, set a new standard for highlight films, told the Associated Press that Miller "is going everywhere and he is all over the place, like a rodeo." Phil Mahre, who with his brother Steve dominated the technical events 20 years ago during the last golden era for U.S. men's skiing, has been complimentary toward Miller but also described his form as "undisciplined."

Mike Kenney, Jo Miller's brother, thinks it's beautiful.

"I'd call it, overall, relaxed," he said. "As he comes out of turns, he's very light on his skis. One characteristic of our family is that we have unusual elasticity in our connective tissue. It gives the visual impression of being very fluid."

If Kenney sounds like a teacher, that's no accident. Instruction runs in the family.